1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of shopping over computer networks, for example a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), and any combination thereof. In particular, the invention relates to the field of tools for building, modifying, maintaining and accessing shopping lists for shopping over computer networks.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is increasingly being exploited as a means to reach consumers directly. For example, purchasing consumable items from an electronic grocery or retail outlet is a business beginning to take form on the Internet. However, current practice has identified several contributing factors acting as barriers to wide acceptance of this new marketing channel. First, shopping in a grocery store will occur one or more times a week. Second, the typical inventory is on the order of tens of thousands of products, many of which are sold in several different sizes. Thirdly, consumers selecting to use such a service are doing so in the hope of saving time.
However, shopping for a hundred or so items out of an inventory of thousands or tens of thousands of items in an electronic shopping service is thus far a very tedious task for consumers. This task becomes worse when the service is utilized several times a month. Such a service can relate to many different situations too numerous to mention. A good example at the retail level is replenishing consumable and perishable items like groceries from a supermarket. A good example on the wholesale level is a building contractor purchasing building supplies.
The IBM Net.Commerce application and several other implemented shopping services utilize the notion of an electronic shopping cart. The inventory of the store is presented in a text list or in graphical form, perhaps through images of the stacked shelves in the store, by an Internet network. Items are placed into the shopping cart, for example by selecting a text item or by moving a product icon from a shelf into an electronic shopping cart by manipulating a computer pointer such as a mouse. Items in the cart can be reviewed and removed, that is deleted, prior to ordering.
Simple shopping carts do not address the problems associated with searching the store and selecting the items. This process can be both time consuming and unproductive in the sense that the consumer may not be able to find what they are looking for even though the store may offer the item in their inventory. Moreover, many purchases are repurchases of the same items over and over, for example milk, juice, cereal, eggs and bread in the context of grocery shopping. Notwithstanding the need for repetitive purchases, it is usually necessary to start with an empty shopping cart.
Other services offered by Peapod (www.peapod.com), Streamline, Hannaford (www.hannaford.com), PCFoods (pcfoods.com), Pinkdot (www.pinkdot.com), and Wal-Mart (www.wal-mart.com), for example, also exhibit the shortcomings noted above.
There is a pressing need to simplify many aspects of electronic shopping. One such aspect is that of inventories that are unmanageably large, from the viewpoint of a consumer perusing a vast number of items. A second such aspect is that of simplifying the repetitive purchase of consumable and perishable items, without always having to start with the equivalent of an empty shopping cart. A third such aspect is simplifying the computer operating tasks which must be undertaken to implement the electronic shopping. Overall, there is a pressing need to find a method or tool which enables consumers to save significant amounts of time by utilizing electronic shopping.